Shiho Satsuka

Biography

Shiho Satsuka’s research concerns the politics of knowledge, discourses of nature and science, and cultural practices of capitalism. She is interested in how divergent understandings of nature are produced, circulated, contested and transformed in translocal interactions shaped by the global expansion of capitalism. Her first book, Nature in Translation: Freedom, Subjectivity and Japanese Tourism Encounters in Canada, analyzes the way Japanese tour guides translate ecological knowledge in national parks in the Canadian Rockies. The book examines how the guides’ translation of nature is related to the construction of their subjectivity, both as transnational flexible workers and as embodiments of Japanese cosmopolitan desire. She is currently working on her second book project examining the social role of scientists in the emerging global scientific and commercial networks associated with matsutake, a highly valued wild mushroom. In particular, she focuses on satoyama movements that aim to revitalize the traditional agrarian forests that produce matsutake, the politics of translation between expert science and other forms of knowledge, and the emerging discourses of “new commons” that envision alternative social and human-nonhuman relations. This research is also part of a collaborative, multi-sited ethnographic project, “Matsutake Worlds”. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Germany in 2012.

Research Interest

politics of knowledge, cultural translation, nature, science, environment, capitalism, work, subjectivity, tourism, translocal interactions, popular culture, gender